Complete walk-through install of Windows 95 in Virtualbox (1 of 2)

I noticed that the tutorials available for installing Windows 95 in Virtualbox were, in a word, bad. There are more than a few people who have a genuine interest in getting ’95 working in Vbox for older apps, games and so on, so what I did is made a complete video on it. This is part one of two. It is really, really long. :) This first part covers actually getting ’95 installed. The second part covers video drivers and apps.

If you would like to embed this video elsewhere such as on a forum or your own blog, go ahead – I don’t have a problem with that. The link to the video is http://menga.blip.tv/file/3803286/. You can also get the embed code by clicking the “triple-dot” icon below the video itself.

Note: This video is 16 minutes long. I’ve purposely recorded these videos in long-form format to cover any type of problem you’d encounter with the installation.

Back on blip.tv

Lately I’ve become very disenchanted with YouTube. They keep changing stuff around all the time and it’s getting really, really irritating. It’s cool I get the video views and whatnot, but the way the system works on an admin level is a nightmare. I’ll put it to you this way: If you login to YouTube now, then not login to it for 3 months, it will be different the next you login. Something will have changed or been outright removed. Could be a button, a link or whatever. It doesn’t matter because you’ll spend 10 minutes trying to do something that only took seconds the last time you were logged in.

Very recently I reactivated my blip.tv account, menga.blip.tv. I seriously like the way blip.tv works. It’s an absolute joy to use compared to YouTube. Everything is laid out in a nice easy way, the support is awesome, the options available to you are plentiful and useful (keyword there), etc. It’s just a better system.

What I’m going to do is a tried-and-true tradition that many disenchanted YouTubers do: Post “pointer” vids to my YouTube channel and tell people to go to my blip.tv account to watch the full video there.

If you want to get the leg up on my newest vids without the pointer-vid YouTube crapola, you’ll see them here on my blog or you can sub an RSS feed or whatever on my blip.tv channel mentioned above.

Back when the skies were a lot friendlier

There are times when everybody says at one point or another, “Geez, I was born in the wrong generation!” This is one of those times.

Recently I came across the web site LOGO R.I.P. It’s a small collection of large company logos that are no longer used; one of them is Pan American World Airways. This airline company is only known to those that flew a lot prior to the 1990s, because Pan Am folded in 1991.

LOGO R.I.P.’s “condolences” page on Pan Am is nothing short of amazing, and makes me really wish I had flown that airline back when they were hopping with business in the 1960s. Here’s a few quotes from that page:

Gone but not forgotten! I spent the most wonderful 18 years of my life while working for PanAm. It was the best civil aviation school that I have ever attended. It was an honor to work for PanAm. ”You can’t Beat The Experience” slogan of PanAm proved it ! ”The Blue Globe will always remain in my heart and soul.

It was the best aviation school in the airline industry. I miss PanAm very much and I pray that one day a miracle will happen and there will be PanAm again. We the PanAm people used to say the color of the blood in our veins was blue! PanAm is a Legend.

I grew up in Miami, FL where PanAm had their beautiful amphibias port and repair facility, My neighbor told srories of wearing roller skates while chaseing parts in the huge warehouses in Coconut Grove. PanAm gave sleepy Miami it’s first taste of cosmopolitan glamour and site of the “blue globe” will always serve up a special warm-and-fuzzy felling to this Miami native.

When you flew Pan Am, you were truly in for a real treat because it was a fantastic airline. Why? Because the employees genuinely enjoyed working there. Stories like the above are the type you simply cannot buy; they only come from those who truly had pride in their jobs.

And when’s the last time you heard anybody describing pride in their job working at any modern airline? Probably never.

Pan Am, by the way, is a Florida original; it started in Key West. At their peak they were the flag carrier for the United States as a nation.

The way Pan Am ended was absolutely horrific. 7,500 jobs were lost. In the Miami area, 9,000 were lost when you combined both the in-airline and all the other jobs that depended on the airline’s existence. A whole ton of former employees then sued the corporation after that. The whole thing was just a nightmare.

Why did Pan Am fold? It was more or less a classic example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Corporate mismanagement was all too obvious, no one seemed to care about what was going on within the organization, the US government paid a blind eye to its own flag carrier, and so everyone rode it out until the company simply imploded.

Aside from the whole folding debacle, I truly would have enjoyed flying Pan Am in the 60s or very-early 70s. It was a time when flying was very affordable, so traveling abroad via Pan Am was truly a great way to get to your destination. In addition, the people who worked for the airline truly wanted to be there, and it showed.

Pan Am still exists, but not as an airline. It’s now Pan Am Railways – and they even still use the old logo!

But that logo sure looked better on a Boeing.

More cool Pan Am stuff can be found at PanAmAir.org.

5 reasons why self-hosted blogs are still the best way to blog

If you decide to start a blog of your own, it all starts with where the blog is physically hosted. A “self-hosted” blog means you have your own dot-com/net/org/whatever, you physically installed the blog engine on your web site, configure it, update it yourself, etc. Is it a pain in the ass to do? Yes, but I have 5 good reasons why it’s a good thing to do.

Small note: When I refer to “freebie” blog hosters, I’m referring to services like Blogger, Windows Live Spaces, WordPress.com (but not WordPress.org), and so on.

1. No flag button.

The flag button is something that to the best of my knowledge is on every freebie blog hoster.

What it means in a nutshell is this: “You can post anything you want, but if enough people complain about you, you’ll be shut down.”

That stupid flag button – which is on every single blog post you make on a freebie – forces you to adjust your content style just so that people don’t literally flag you off. That’s stupid.

2. You can run any ad service you want.

Let’s say your blog has gained a decent following and you want to install an ad service to make a few bucks from the traffic. On a self-hosted blog, you can run any ad service you want. AdBrite, Google AdSense, whatever, doesn’t matter. Your hoster doesn’t care as long as it’s not pornographic. On the freebie blogs, you either can’t run any ads at all, or they do offer it but you only get one choice, and of course its their ad system so they get a piece of the pie and you have to play by their rules to boot.

3. You can sell anything you want.

Something that’s widely unknown about freebie blog hosters is that on many it’s outright forbidden to sell anything on them. Maybe after gaining a following you want to publish a book, so you sign up a CreateSpace or Lulu account, upload your book, set a price, then post a link to it on your blog. You might be able to get away with this for a while, but if the freebie blog hoster admins see it, boom, your blog is gone.

Ridiculous? Yes. But they don’t want you to use their free service as an engine to make you any money without them getting some of it, and this includes the prohibiting of selling anything.

I should point out that posting things like one-time eBay links are fine, but if you’re attempting to sell something with any sort of regularity business-style, that will raise the eyebrows of the freebie hoster quickly and they will step in to shut you down.

4. You can run anything you want.

The way in which a freebie hoster works is to only offer a very limited set of options as to what you can do with your blog. It is the definition of a caged environment. Want to install plugins? Want to install custom themes? Want to install a forum alongside your blog? You’ll get a big fat no, no and no on those with the freebie hosters.

Most of the freebies do, of course, offer paid ways of enabling certain features and other stuff, but the sad truth is that by the time you’ve enabled everything you want, you will have spent more than you would have with a cheap 5-buck-a-month paid host.

The best way to realize how much the freebies screw you over with their paid offerings is to do some quick math using annual figures.

A cheap 5-buck-a-month hoster like this one is $60 yearly + domain registration free. At most you’ll be paying around $75 yearly when it’s all put together.

When you add in all the stuff you want to do with the paid options on a freebie hoster, I guarantee it will exceed that amount for the year. Sure, when you look at the feature list you’ll see little prices. $15 for this, $20 for that, another $10 for that, and so on. Add all those up. Then realize that even if you bought every single feature in the list, you still don’t have the freedom a true self-hosted blog has.

5. Having a self-hosted blog enables a whole bunch of stuff besides the blog itself.

Here’s a very, very short list of some of the things you can do on a self-hosted web site:

• Have multiple blogs on multiple domains.
• Have custom email addresses with you@yoursite.com.
• Have an infinite about of forwarding email addresses.
• Have a shopping cart system.
• Run a forum.
• Have NO ADS ANYWHERE, EVER – unless you choose to put them in to make money for yourself.
• Have access to install tons and tons of different stuff.

I could make a five-page list and beyond, but you get the idea. With self-hosted stuff, a blog is only one of many things you can do with your own web site.

Whether you choose to be a personal or problogger, do the self-hosted thing. Yes, it costs money, but anything that’s worth doing will require an investment of some kind. Also bear in mind that the investment also requires time. You will be required to learn the basics of PHP, MySQL, possible some graphics editing and so on. If that scares you, it should, but know that the end result is totally worth it because you have total control.

Living with a netbook, 10 months later

Back in August 2009 I purchased a refurbished Dell mini 10v. I use this netbook almost every day, so believe me, I’ve put it through its paces.

The configuration is exactly the same as when I purchased it, that being a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, no optical drive, 1024×576 10-inch screen.

Over the course of 10 months it’s had three different OSes on it. It was Windows XP Home, then Windows 7 (which I miss dearly on the netbook), then Ubuntu 10.04, then back to XP Home.

I’ve pretty much made the decision that for the life of the unit it’s going to stay on XP. However I have entertained the idea of putting Windows 2000 on it just to eke out some extra speed. The only reason I don’t is because it’s most likely true the Dell proprietary Windows drivers wouldn’t work in 2000, and I don’t want to waste my time trying 2000 knowing that would probably happen.

Build quality

I can say without any shadow of a doubt that the mini 10v is the best built laptop I’ve ever owned. It’s never felt like a toy, it’s solid in every single way you could think of and absolutely nothing on it has even hinted that it’s going to wear out any time soon. I’m very impressed with it. Believe me when I say I use this thing a lot. Not even the keys have shown any hint of the lettering wearing/fading out. It’s a very well-constructed unit with good parts in and out.

Workarounds for speed limitations

The primary browser I use on the 10v is Google Chrome. Before that it was Opera. Both run around the same speed, but Chrome’s engine has an easier time with web sites than Opera’s does. At present I don’t even have Opera installed on the 10v any longer.

I don’t use IE at all, and as for Firefox I barely use it on the 10v now. If I wanted the ultimate concerning the speediest Firefox, the answer is not to use Firefox but rather a browser that uses the same engine without any of the fluff. That browser is K-Meleon. The reason I don’t use it is because it’s a bit wonky in operation, plus I run into that “Your browser isn’t supported” crapola from time to time on certain sites.

As I mentioned in a previous bloggo, I use Game Booster to shut off any unnecessary services XP runs – and that’s been working out quite well.

Would I buy another netbook?

No, for only two reasons:

1. I run into screen resolution issues.
2. I wish it were faster.

If this netbook were a 12-inch screen with a 1280×800 or 1366×768 resolution, outfitted with a Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 64-bit, it would be absolutely perfect – and I’m not kidding.

The next laptop I buy for whenever that happens will be in that specific configuration. Technically anything over a 10-inch is considered “regular laptop” territory, and that’s fine by me.

I’ve been checking out what’s on NewEgg, and the configuration I mentioned above is available for almost under $500. That’s amazing.

A laptop in a 12 or 13-inch variant as described above with Windows 7 is what I consider to be the ultimate portable computer. Super-light, super-portable, views all web sites easily, runs all apps easily, has better-than-average battery life (around 4 to 6 hours).. it’s perfection assuming the build quality is on par with a Dell mini 10v.

The brand I’ll most likely go for is a storied one, the ThinkPad. No, not the IdeaPad, the ThinkPad. They’re still built with excellent quality, have that good all-business look to them and deliver where it counts.

As for when I’d buy one.. well.. that’ll probably take a while. :) That’s okay however since the 10v is still and outstanding little laptop, even with its limitations.

In comparison…

Recently I had to perform some work on an older Dell Latitude D531. This laptop is huge and heavy.

As I was working on it, I realized something.

I don’t like big laptops anymore.

After you’ve used a smaller laptop long enough, using a big one is just plain annoying. You can’t carry it in one hand easily and the battery life is awful (3 hours tops). Sure, it’s a full five inches bigger on the diagonal compared to the 10v, but the extra bulk that goes along with that simply isn’t worth the bother.

This is why I say the 12 or 13-inch laptops are the “just right” size, physically. They’re only slightly larger than a netbook, but pack just as much speed and convenience as the bigger models do. As long as you have a bare minimum resolution of 1280×800, you’re good to go.

And said honestly, 1280×800 on a 12 or 13-inch screen is very, very readable. Even those with poor eyesight would be able to view everything on one easily.

Today is Thursday, July 29, 2010

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